Digging James Dean: A Nina Zero Novel

A great read with great characters and story. Kind of a blend of Raymond Chandler and Kinky Friedman, but better characters than both. If you like good mysteries don't miss it.

This is the fourth installment in the "Nina Zero" noir-punk series by Eversz. Eversz continues to produce a well-written thriller about Hollywood low-lifes and bottom feeders. In "Digging James Dean" our protagonist comes up against a ghoulish cult of desperate wanna-be actors. Nina, who in the prior books was a violent anti-social loser, suffers major loss in this novel and somehow comes across as much milder and more in the role of rescuer. Also Nina reunites with her sister who is a con artist and much more anti-social than Nina. Definitely fun and worth reading if a little less intense than prior novels.

I had my doubts about this excellent series (of which this is the fourth installment) because I wasn't sure the author could keep it up. Too many branded series ("A Nina Zero Novel") begin to degenerate into dull routine after the first couple of volumes. But I have to applaud Eversz for maintaining a high narrative standard. For that matter, it's not uncommon for a female author to successfully write from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, but the vice is seldom versa. Nina Zero -- who used to be Mary Alice Baker -- is an exception, though. On parole for a justified manslaughter, working as a paparazza for an L.A. tabloid, she's a fascinating and generally believable character. This time, her mother has died of a heart attack, though Nina wonders if it wasn't caused indirectly by her abusive father, against whom Nina stills carries enormous rage. At the funeral home, she meets her sister, who ran away from home at sixteen and whom she hasn't seen in more than twenty years. But her sister also has secrets. All this personal history, which makes Nina the often violent person she is, is woven through a somewhat bizarre plot involving celebrity grave-robbing, black magic, and a secret society that (maybe) controls Hollywood. The immediate plot points are resolved, more or less, but Eversz leaves most of those larger questions unanswered -- or maybe he's saving them up for the next book. (I'd also like to know where Nina's going to live, now that her savings and her apartment are both gone and she has to have a permanent address to stay out on parole.) The author, as always, does a first-rate job with his characters, especially Frank the tabloid reporter and Theresa, the starlet-wannabe. And he doesn't let a happy ending survive contact with reality, as when Theresa is arrested. This is definitely a series I shall continue to follow.

Hollywood paparazzi Nina Zero works for the tabloid Scandal Times fittingly out of a former sewage works warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. Her boss Frank informs Nina that the two of them are flying to Chicago and from there driving to a cemetery in Fairmount, Indiana where someone stole the remains of Rebel Without a Cause actor James Dean. Frank tells Nina that her parole officer gave the okay for her and her Frank to go on the assignment. In Indiana, Nina and Frank wonder who would steal the bones of Dean and why. Could the culprits be kids on a lark, the Raelians who believe ET scientists planted humanity on earth and desire a cloning of Mr. Dean, or a the Church of the Divine Thespians, whom she "met" in Hollywood through a tip from a rough living sixteen year old recent Hoosier transplant. Anyway you look at it; Nina plans to rattle a bone or two even as the skeletons from her own past such as Mary Alice Baker (her family name) surface to shake her complacency. The latest Nina Zero Hollywood (and in this case Indiana) tale is a wild journalistic investigative tale that is all over the place, but ultimately returns to classic American economics of supply and demand (everything has a price and is for sale). A subplot involving Mary Alice's sister whom she has not seen in decades adds knowledge to what readers know about the ex-con. Though the ending may put some readers off the series (this reviewer thought it apropos), Robert Eversz third tale may be a Zero, but is also a five star look at Hollywood. Harriet Klausner